27th
June
2001
“Designing good road signage can’t be easy. How much do you tell drivers? How soon? In words or with diagrams? The trouble is that signs are specified by engineers who know exactly how an intersection is supposed to work. If it’s a big interchange, they’ve spent months working out exactly how vehicles should flow from all the entrances to all the exits. The designers could drive through the interchange with no signs at all to guide them, and that’s the problem. Nobody can give them the priceless gift of ignorance; they can’t see what ordinary drivers will see when the interchange opens to traffic.”
posted in Information design | Permalink |
27th
June
2001
“Memory “illusions” may result from the basic human need to make sense out of events. A series of experiments has provided the first scientific evidence that when people see effects (a student toppling onto the floor) without also seeing its cause (a student leaning back in a chair), they automatically “fill in the blank” with that probable cause — even if they haven’t actually seen it with their own two eyes… Because memory for pictures tends to be very accurate and robust, the experiments used pictorial stimuli, not the more typically studied text stimuli, as a more rigorous test of the error. What’s more, ‘we put a lot of confidence in things that we have seen with our own eyes,’ says Reinitz, ’so applications to real-world situations are probably more varied and interesting than would be the case if we used text.’”
posted in Visual thinking | Permalink |
27th
June
2001
“In web-speak, a wireframe is a skeletal rendering of every click-through possibility on your site — a text-only ‘action,’ ‘decision’ or ‘experience’ model. Its purpose is to maintain the flow of your specific logical and business functions by identifying all the entry and exit points your users will experience on every page of your site. The goal is to ensure your needs and the needs of your visitors will be met effectively in the resulting website.”
posted in Web development | Permalink |
27th
June
2001
“Anyone with more than a passing interest in issues of GUI design will profit from reading GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Do’s for Software Developers and Web Designers, by Jeff Johnson. Like the classic works by Edward Tufte, Johnson illustrates deep principles using concrete examples.”
posted in Interface design | Permalink |
